When we hear the word "creation", we are likely to think back to
events of the distant past. The origin of the universe, the formation of the
earth, and the development of life are the subjects of creation. The first verse
of the Bible is "In the beginning God created the heavens and the
earth." And science also speaks about the distant past. Weinberg's The
First Three Minutes1This provides a
good introduction to modern scientific cosmology. describes what science has
learned about that brief period of a couple of hundred seconds shortly after the
Big Bang, some ten billion years ago.

When we think of creation in this way, discussions about the relationships
between science and religion focus on the past. What can science say about the
past, and what do its discoveries have to do with our religious beliefs about
origins? We concentrate on the grand, large-scale questions of the origin,
structure, and ultimate fate of life and the cosmos.

We must deal with those questions, but they are not the most profitable place
to begin the dialogue between science and theology. I suggest that we follow the
more modest procedure by which science has achieved its successes, and start by
considering what goes on in the world in our own neighborhood at the present
time. Such a procedure is in no way foreign to theology. In his Small
Catechism, Luther explains that to believe in creation means, first of all,
that God provides each one of us with what we need for our life today.

This approach to creation brings out the connections between this doctrine
and the most distinctive feature of Christianity. Our doctrine of creation is
part of a theology of the cross.

2. SCIENTIFIC COSMOLOGY

Science has been successful largely because it has concentrated on
understanding the world of everyday experience before trying to deal with the
grand questions of the structure and origin of the universe. The regularities of
nature were first realized by observing the motions of the heavenly bodies, and
the larger picture given by astronomy has always been kept in view. But consider
how astronomical phenomena have come to be explained in the modern era.

In the time of Newton, the planetary system was thought to be described by
the Copernican model which Kepler had improved. The planets moved around the sun
in elliptical orbits, as did moons around their planets. But why did they move
this way?

Newton's crucial insight was that gravity, which causes objects to fall to
the earth, might extend into the celestial realm: he "began to think of
gravity extending to ye orb of the moon."2The
story that this was prompted by seeing an apple fall to the ground is probably
fictitious, but the idea may be correct. "Perhaps," Newton may
have thought, "whatever makes an apple fall to the earth also makes the
moon fall around the earth." Calculation shows that this may be correct if
gravity weakens in proportion to the inverse square of the distance, and if - a
critical assumption - the laws which govern the motion of apples on the earth
also apply to the moon.

Perhaps all bodies have this power of gravitation. That could explain the
motions of the planets around the sun. Eventually this idea of universal
gravitation was extended far beyond the solar system to determine the masses of
stars and help in the development of theories of stellar evolution. Today it is
the tool we use to try to estimate the masses of galaxies.

None of this work involved reflection on how the universe as a whole came
into being. There were cosmological speculations such as Kant's, but they were
of secondary importance. Scientists concentrated on studying matter and motion
in our own neighborhood of space and time, and then began to extrapolate what
they learned to distant regions and the far past.

Physicists applied what they learned in their laboratories to the study of
starlight, and thus were able to learn about the distribution, structure and
evolution of stars. By the early years of this century astronomers knew that we
were in the midst of many millions of stars spread through a disk about a
hundred thousand light years across. This is the Milky Way, which is easily
observed in our night skies in summer. But it was soon found to be only one of
such galaxies. Others, such as the galaxy in Andromeda, are millions of
light years away.

It was humbling to find that the universe of galaxies stretches out for
thousands of millions of light years, but this was not yet the major
breakthrough which set modern scientific cosmology on its way. The really
radical discovery came from two lines of evidence which indicate that the
universe is expanding - that the galaxies are moving away from one another.

The first evidence came from the analysis of light from galaxies, which is
found to be shifted toward the red end of the spectrum. The simplest explanation
for this is the Doppler effect. When a source of waves approaches an observer,
the waves are squeezed together and the wavelength is decreased, while waves
from a receding source are stretched out and the wavelengths increased. This can
be heard in the sound from the horn of a passing automobile, which drops in
pitch as the car passes you. That shows how "down to earth" the
Doppler effect is. But the effect is also seen in the light from celestial
bodies. The shift to longer wavelengths at the red end of galactic spectra
suggests that these galaxies are receding from us.

At around the time this discovery was being made, Einstein realized that the
key to understanding gravity was the old observation that all bodies fall at the
same rate in a gravitational field. This led him to the use of non-Euclidean
geometry and an explanation of gravitation in terms of the curvature of
space-time. When his theory was applied to cosmology, it was found that the
simplest models of the universe were expanding or contracting spaces. Such
universes could not remain constant with time, but evolved. Thus Einstein's
theory can provide models of an expanding universe in which galaxies recede from
one another.

So observation and theory both point toward a "Big Bang" model, in
which all the matter in the universe is expanding as from a cosmic explosion in
the past. From measurements of galactic distances and speeds, we can estimate
that this explosion occurred between ten and fifteen thousand million years ago,
our present value for the age of the universe. The age of the earth, estimated
from abundances of radioactive substances, is about five thousand million years.

These facts of modern cosmology were discovered by extrapolating discoveries
made in our own vicinity. Our basic assumption has been that the laws of physics
which describe phenomena on the earth today also apply throughout the universe
of space and time. If this is so, we have the possibility of understanding the
cosmos from our own quite small observation post.

That assumption could be wrong. The laws of physics which apply across vast
stretches of the universe might differ from those we find on earth. Scientists
who developed the Steady State cosmology thought that the law of conservation of
energy was only an approximation, and that matter and energy came into existence
at a very slow rate throughout space. Extrapolation of the cosmic expansion back
to a Big Bang would then not be valid. The universe could expand forever without
undergoing any systematic change, for the continual origin of matter would keep
the average density of matter throughout the universe always the same.

Did the universe in the past differ from its state today, as the Big Bang
theory says? Was the universe in the distant past much denser and hotter than it
is now? The answer, we now know, is "Yes." In the 1960s, scientists
detected microwave radiation from all parts of the sky. Measurements of this
"microwave background" have convinced almost all cosmologists that it
is a relic from the early universe, perhaps half a million years after the Big
Bang.

Extrapolation of the laws discovered on earth has taken us close to the
beginning of the universe. And we can get even closer. The lightest atomic
nuclei were, we believe, formed by fusion reactions in the very hot conditions
just after the Big Bang. By applying our knowledge of nuclear physics gained in
terrestrial laboratories, we can find out something of what the universe was
like when it was only a few minutes old. (We cannot reproduce all the
conditions of this period together in a laboratory, since temperatures were
several thousand million degrees. But we can study the individual nuclear
reactions which may have taken place at that time.)

Cosmologists today are applying theories of particle physics and gravitation
to get even closer to the beginning, within fractions of a second. The hope is
to be able to get as close as possible to the very beginning, and thus
understand why the universe today is as we observe it.

PROVIDENCE AND CREATION

Keeping in mind these facts about our picture of the universe and the way
science has gained them, we turn to the Christian understanding of the world's
relationship to God. In traditional theology there were two relevant parts of
the doctrine of creation. Creation in the narrow sense was God's act of
calling all things into being ex nihilo in the past. This work of
origination was thought to be supernatural, beyond the scope of philosophy or
science. But creation also included providence, sometimes described as
"continuing creation." While this might include miracles, God's
ordinary providence was understood to take place in the everyday processes of
the world. This was formalized in ideas of "co-operation": God
"works with" the processes of nature, as a carpenter works with a
hammer or saw to build a house. (One difference is that God created his tools
out of nothing, which ordinary carpenters cannot do!)

Through God's providential acts, the original creation is preserved and
governed toward the ends which God wishes to accomplish. Providence was thought
of as a work secondary to God's original work of creation. That is why creation
so often is identified with the beginning of things. I suggest that we reverse
the way in which we think of origination and providence, and discuss first God's
action in the world today. After we have a coherent way to think about
this, we will go on to consider the divine work of origination.

When Luther explains in the Small Catechism what it means to say that
God is "creator of heaven and earth",it is the present divine
activity in the world which he emphasizes.3

I believe that God has created me together with all
creatures. God has given me and still preserves my body and soul: eyes, ears,
and all limbs and senses; reason and all mental faculties. In addition God
daily and abundantly provides shoes and clothing, food and drink, house and
home, spouse and children, fields, livestock, and all property - along with
all the necessities and nourishment for this body and life. God protects me
against all danger and shields and preserves me from all evil. God does all
this out of pure, fatherly, and divine goodness and mercy, without any merit
or worthiness of mine at all! For all of this I owe it to God to thank and
praise, serve and obey him. This is most certainly true.

"All creatures" includes dinosaurs and distant galaxies . But
Luther does not emphasize God's work in the past. His focus is on the fact that
God puts shoes on our feet and bread on our tables.

For definiteness, let us concentrate on the way we get our food. The Bible
says that God provides it: "The eyes of all look to you, and you give them
their food in due season. You open your hand, satisfying the desire of every
living thing" (Ps.145:15-16 NRSV). But there is another way to speak of the
matter. Grain grows in the fields through processes of weather, soil chemistry,
genetics, and photosynthesis by which green plants use sunlight to convert
carbon dioxide and water into carbohydrates. The energy in sunlight comes from
thermonuclear reactions in the center of the sun. When wheat has grown, it is
turned into bread through the work of farmers, millers and bakers, and the
various activities of the economic system.

All of those things that happen in order for us to have bread can be
explained quite naturally without any reference to God. We understand these
processes in much greater detail than anyone in Luther's time; but long before
the sixteenth century, people knew that bread came through the regular processes
of nature. If you don't sow and harvest, you go hungry. Intelligent Christians
have always understood that when they pray, "Give us this day our daily
bread", God does not normally respond by making loaves of bread appear out
of nothing.

There is a network of natural processes which connects sun and earth and
seeds and the bread on our table. God's action is not some special link in that
network, to which we can point as evidence of God's involvement. God is at work
in every process, co-operating with it.

Natural processes are thus instruments with which God works. But they play
another role as well. Since we can understand what happens in terms of them, we
are never able directly to observe God at work in the world. No matter how
carefully we study events with scientific techniques, all we will see will be
the materials of the world interacting in various ways. Natural processes hide
God from our direct observation. And this is precisely the way in which Luther
speaks in another place:4

What else is all our work to God - whether in the fields, in
the city, in the house, in war, or in government - but just such a child's
performance, by which He wants to give His gifts in the fields, at home, and
everywhere else? These are the masks of God, behind which He wants to remain
concealed and do all things.

Natural processes are not only God's instruments but God's masks, larvae
dei.

The idea that God is "concealed" by the ongoing work of creation
goes to the heart of Luther's theology of the cross. Since God is hidden, we
cannot argue from the beauties of nature or the regularities of physical
processes to the existence or activity of God. Such arguments are common ways in
which people try to arrive at some understanding of God, as the continuing
popularity of "arguments from design" for the existence of God
testify. Luther too, at times, accepted the traditional idea that even the
heathen should be able to recognize that there is a creator by such
considerations. But in his theses for the Heidelberg Disputation of 1518, he
rejected attempts to discover God by such means as false "theologies of
glory." Luther's distinction between such theologies and the genuine
theology of the cross is set out here.5

That person does not deserve to be called a theologian who looks upon the
invisible things of God as though they were clearly perceptible in those things
which have actually happened.

He deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible
and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross.

A theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theologian of the
cross calls the thing what it actually is.

The hiddenness of God's activity in natural processes is the same type of
thing as the hiddenness of God's saving work in the cross of Christ. Nothing
seems less salvific to our natural way of thinking than the God-forsaken man who
hangs dead on Golgotha. Yet God is revealed to faith precisely here, in the
apparent absence of God.

God is present in the beauty of the world and the regularities of nature
which science describes, but that is not where we begin to discern God. We know
the true God who is present and active in the world only when God has been
revealed in "suffering and the cross." The characteristic activity of
God is to accomplish his gracious work in spite of the apparent lack of any
possibility of it from a creaturely standpoint. The God revealed in the cross is
the one "who justifies the ungodly, ... gives life to the dead and calls
into existence the things that do not exist" (Rom.4:5, 17 NRSV). And
the task of theology in its interaction with science is to discern the activity
of this God in the phenomena which science explores. I have called this approach
to the science-theology dialogue "chiasmic cosmology", a search for
the God "placed crosswise [echiasen] in the universe". That is
a phrase which Plato used in his creation story in the Timaeus, and which
Justin Martyr thought was a prophecy of the cross of Christ.6

To see the world in this way, as a creation of the God revealed in the
crucified and risen Christ, is a matter of faith. We believe in
God as the creator. Science can tell us how things happen in the world, but not
that the world is the work of a creator. The scientist may be struck with a
sense of awe and wonder at the order of the universe. But science cannot compel
one to believe in a creator, let alone tell us who that creator might be.

This is no appeal for theologians to tell scientists how to do their work.
Within its own domain, science needs no theological assistance. There is a story
that Napoleon asked the physicist Laplace why he had made no mention of God in
his monumental work on celestial mechanics. The scientist is supposed to have
replied, "Sire, I did not need that hypothesis." And as a scientist,
Laplace was right! No competent scientist, whatever his or her religion, would
be content to explain a puzzling result of an experiment by saying "God did
it."

God is hidden by natural processes because of the thoroughness with which
they can be described by rational laws. The idea that the world can be
understood "Though God were not given"7 is
demanded by the theology of the cross. If some natural phenomena could only be
understood by reference to God, if God were only partly hidden, then God would
not be hidden at all.

This suggests that God freely limits the use of his power in creation, and
normally acts only through natural processes. The divine activity is kenotic: As
Christ "emptied himself", took the form of a slave, and was obedient
to death on a cross (Phil.2:5-8), God has "emptied" himself of the
prerogative of acting arbitrarily, and limits himself to working in accord with
the laws of nature which he has created. In the language of scholasticism, we
observe in the world the exercise of God's ordinate, but not God's absolute,
power.

This does not rule out all miracles. We will see that the laws of physics
have enough flexibility to allow unexpected things to happen. Miracles are best
thought of as rare phenomena which God has allowed for in the laws of physics
rather than as "violations" of those laws. But we should resist an
undue eagerness for miracles, which is often a sign of a theology of glory.

God's self-limitation is a tremendous gift. If the universe did not operate
in accord with rational laws, we would not be able to make sense of the world.
Not only would science be impossible, but life itself would be a nightmare. We
wouldn't know what substances were nutritious and which were poisonous, when the
sun would rise, or whether water would flow uphill or down. But because the
universe is rational, we can live in it, not as slaves or animals in a zoo, but
as intelligent citizens of the cosmos. This is an aspect of the goodness of
creation (Gen.1:31), which van Till refers to it as creation's "functional
integrity".8 The world works thoroughly and
well. God does not have to keep taking his tools back to the shop for repairs.

4. THE TOOLS OF GOD

Science by itself does not tell us about God, but theology by itself does
not tell us about the instruments God uses. To understand these we must consider
the present state of physics. A full survey is impossible now, but some points
relevant to our discussion should be noted.

First, the world does make sense. We never will understand the world
completely, but the successes of science can give us confidence that it has a
rational pattern to which our laws of physics are approximations. These laws are
not merely imposed on the world in our attempts to control it. The objective
rationality of the universe is shown by the fact that our theories are able to
predict new phenomena, which are then found to exist in reality. Halley's
prediction of the return of the comet named for him and Yukawa's prediction of
the pi-meson as the mediator of nuclear forces are only two important examples
of this predictive capacity of science.

The cosmic order is mathematical: "God is a mathematician of a very high
order," exclaimed Dirac, "And ... he used very advanced mathematics in
constructing the universe."9But the
particular order that we observe is not a necessary truth. Since the discoveries
of non-Euclidean geometries in the nineteenth century, we have known that there
is not just a single valid system of mathematics. Other universes, embodying
other rational patterns could exist. Torrance has thus spoken of the doctrine of
the contingent rationality of the universe as an expression of divine freedom
and divine reason.10 The universe makes sense, but
a sense which God has freely chosen. Thus observation of the world, as well as
thought, must be used in order to find out what the universe is really like.

Secondly, our world is one of change. This dynamic character is obvious with
the expansion of the universe, biological evolution, or continental drift, but
we also see it on the smallest scales. The world is not composed of particles of
inert substance which bounce off one another in various ways. At a fundamental
level, matter is interaction. Two electrons interact with one another by
exchanging light quanta, but a single electron also emits and absorbs quanta,
and these processes of emission and absorption make the electron what it is.
This is a consequence of Einstein's relation E = mc2 between energy and mass:
The energy or operation (energeia) of a system is identified with the
material of that system. What appears to us merely as inert mass can be
converted into other forms of energy and can make things happen.

Matter interacts through gravity, electromagnetism, and the weak and strong
nuclear forces. Progress has been made toward unification of these interactions,
and some physicists hope to understand them all as manifestations of one
underlying force. This would, in principle, give us a full understanding of the
nature of matter. But whether or not such a "theory of everything" can
be achieved is still an open question.

Finally, the metaphors of "tools" or "instruments" of God
should not mislead us into an overly mechanical picture of the world. These
tools function in more subtle ways than do the tools of a carpenter. Quantum
theory shows that, at the atomic level, matter does not obey the laws which
govern machines in everyday life. There are unavoidable uncertainties about
sub-atomic processes. They are described by mathematical laws, but those laws
predict only probabilities for various outcomes. At the level of everyday life
as well, strict determinism is a pure abstraction. The behavior of a complicated
system like the earth's atmosphere is so sensitive to small changes in starting
conditions that it is impossible to predict the weather for some date even a few
weeks in the future with any precision.

Thus there is room for freedom in the laws which describe the events taking
place in the world at all levels. The God who works with these processes, and
even limits himself to their operations, can still use them to accomplish the
divine purpose. That means, among other things, that we can pray for rain and
think that our prayers may make a difference.

5. "IN THE BEGINNING ..."

We return now to questions of origins. Science deals with these questions by
gaining an understanding of processes today and then extrapolating it into the
past. We follow the same course in theology, beginning with God's action in the
world today and then extending that to understand God's actions in bringing the
universe and life into being. We are not thinking of God's co-operation with
natural processes simply as a way in which God maintains and governs what God
originated. Instead, we try to understand origination in terms of co-operation.
By examining ancient rocks and light from distant galaxies, we can tell that the
basic interactions of matter have not changed significantly over the course of
cosmic history. The tools which God uses have not changed since they were
brought into being, though they may be combined in new ways. If God today uses
nuclear fusion reactions in the sun to provide the energy which results in our
bread, God could use the same processes to create the elements needed for life
in the cores of earlier stars which exploded and contributed their material to
our sun and its planets. Before that, God worked with gravitation to make
galaxies condense when the universe was young. Still earlier, God used the
interactions of quantum fields to create the basic particles of matter which
compose galaxies, stars, and living things.

And we can try to go back even further in time. Some cosmologists hope to be
able to explain the origin of matter itself as a result of rapidly changing
gravitational fields in the first fraction of a second of the Big Bang. It may
be possible to explain how the material content of the universe came into being
in terms of laws of physics which we find to be valid today.

How could this be? Lucretius asserted long ago that "nothing comes from
nothing", and that has generally been the attitude of materialist
philosophies. However, relativity theory and quantum mechanics give us some new
insights. Because of Einstein's discovery of the equivalence of mass and energy,
physics today recognizes no separate law of conservation of matter, but only a
conservation of total energy, including that residing in apparently inert
matter.

We may imagine a state of the universe which initially contains no material
particles or energy of any kind. Quantum theory allows us to imagine a
discontinuous "jump" to a state in which there are some
particles if the total energy remains the same, and that is possible if the
negative gravitational potential energy between the particles just balances the
positive mc2 of the particles. Matter would have come into being without
violating any physical law.12

That is a crude model, and more sophisticated ones are needed if the argument
is to be convincing. Einstein's theory will not allow us to speak of matter
originating in a pre-existing space and time. Space, time, and matter are
linked, and must have originated together. But the model outlined here indicates
the possibility of a scientific account of the origin of matter.

In an even more radical way, Hawking has developed a speculative model in
which the universe does not come into being at all, but simply is.13
If this attempt were successful, we might need to think of creation as an
eternal dependence of the world upon God. In fact, the idea that God is the
ontological source of the universe is the basic content of belief in creation.
The idea of a temporal beginning, though important in the theological tradition,
is secondary.

Theologically, we see such work as an attempt to discover the tools by which
God creates the world. Atheists will resist the use of these theories, which
they thought had eliminated the idea of divine creation, by theologians. They
are correct in arguing that we have not proved that there is a God who is
using these natural processes as instruments. It would be inconsistent with the
theology of the cross to try to "prove" God or show the necessity of
God from scientific cosmology. But we start from the standpoint of faith, the
belief that the crucified is the creator, and then try to make sense of that
belief. It is a matter of "faith in search of understanding".

Objections also come from some Christians. Surely, they argue, at the
beginning of the universe we must be able to see God's hand at work. But from
the standpoint of faith, we are called to trust in the creator of all things
"placed crosswise in the universe". The creator is the one who, as
Bonhoeffer said, allows himself "to be edged out of the world and on to the
cross".14 He is not "necessary" for
a scientific understanding of the cosmos. God creates the universe by means of
natural processes, in such a way that only those processes can be observed. God
is willing to have those processes which he himself has ordained get the credit
and acclaim for the origin of the world. The creator allows himself to be
upstaged by his own creatures!

Whether he intended to do so or not, Haydn expressed this idea beautifully in
his oratorio Die Sch–pfung. Very quietly come the opening words of the
third verse of Genesis, "Und Gott sprach, `Es werde Licht,' und es
ward" - and then a thunderous "LICHT!" And the roar
and splendor of God's creatures, the musical expression of the light, drown out
the "still small voice" of the creator. Space-time and quantum fields
are, even more completely than Luther could have imagined, "the masks of
God, behind which He wants to remain concealed and do all things." In the
very act of creation we see the divine emptying of self which the cross of
Christ reveals. As Bonhoeffer says in another place, "From the beginning
the world is placed in the sign of the resurrection of Christ from the
dead."15

This understanding of creation leads to a very high view of science, but we
must be wary of excessively exalted ideas of what science can do. To say that
the concept of God is not necessary for scientific understanding of the universe
does not mean that science can explain everything. The universe is, as we have
noted, contingent. Not only might the things in the universe have been arranged
in other ways, but the laws of physics might have been different. Of all the
possible universes which can exist in a mathematician's mind, why does this
particular one exist in reality? A scientist does not have to ask that question,
but of course may ask it. In doing so, however, he or she is going beyond the
bounds of scientific investigation.

The Christian understanding of divine creation of a rational world comes
through the biblical concepts of the wisdom and Logos of God: "All things
came into being through [the Logos]." Connections can be made between this
idea and Plato's concept of the material world as a representation of forms.
These relationships are significant in view of the platonic strain in the
thought of a number of prominent modern physicists, such as Heisenberg and Dirac.

The platonic tradition is helpful, but it can be used in a Christian
understanding of creation only with some significant corrections. The material
world is not an inferior shadow of the world of forms. If anything, it is
superior to a world of bare ideas. "God saw everything that he had
made" - not "everything that he had thought" - "And, behold,
it was very good."

Connected with that view of the material world is the fact that we know who
the Logos is only through the Incarnation. It is necessary to speak of the Logos
before the birth of Jesus, the "unfleshed Logos": "In the
beginning was the Logos." But the Logos would be only a catalogue of
designs for possible universes if it were not that "the Logos became flesh
and lived among us." And that brings us again to the cross: "And we
beheld his glory."

6. THE PRESENCE OF THE CRUCIFIED

The theology of the cross insists that God shares in the pain, abandonment,
and mortality of the world. The cross is the cross of God, and on Good Friday,
as that scandalous line of Rist's hymn sings, "Gott selbst liegt
tot".16This gives us a
fresh way to deal with one of the most difficult problems of theology, the
presence of evil in the world and even, according to modern theories of
evolution, God's use of evil in the creative process.

When Darwin and Wallace presented their theories of evolution in 1859, they
suggested a particular class of processes as critical in the development of
life. There are always variations among members of a species of plants or
animals, and some members will be better suited for survival in a given
environment than will others. Since an ecosystem can only support a limited
number of organisms, those best able to obtain food, breed, and avoid predation
will be most likely to have viable offspring and pass on their characteristics.
Species change slowly over many generations through this process, and new
species will come into being. That is why Darwin entitled his theory On the
Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.

The idea of a gradual development of living things fits in well with the
picture of God's creative work through natural processes. A theological
understanding of evolution is an application of the doctrine of providence. We
see this mediated creation of living things in Genesis 1. God does not call
forth plants and animals from a vacuum but says "Let the earth bring forth
..." and "Let the waters bring forth ..." living things. Many of
the church fathers, such as Gregory of Nyssa, saw this clearly, as Messenger has
described in detail.17

But Darwin and Wallace said more than that living things have evolved. They
argued that natural selection was a major factor in this development. Life has
evolved by processes of competition, privation, death, and extinction. We need
not exaggerate the picture of "nature red in tooth and claw": The
extinction of many species has been a matter of slow decline in birth rates
rather than violent death. But extinction is death. There are no more dinosaurs.
And the extinction of the dinosaurs made available ecological room for the
development of mammals, and eventually of homo sapiens. We are here in
part because other species have died.

These ideas are disturbing because they suggest a picture of God quite
different from the one we expect. They have made it difficult for many modern
people to believe in divine creation. How could a God who is both good and
powerful use suffering, loss, and death to bring about life? It is not
surprising that Darwin, who intended to study for the ministry when he first
went to the university, was by the end of his life not sure that he could
believe in any God.

But the true God is not "good" or "powerful" in the way
that theologies of glory demand. God does not simply make everything work out
well by divine fiat. Nor is God an amoral deity who ruthlessly forces
creatures to suffer in order to work out the divine purpose without himself
being affected by their fate. In the Incarnation, God becomes a participant in
evolution. And on the cross, God participates in that process on the side of the
losers. In natural selection we see the hand, not of a beneficent God of a
theology of glory, but of the creator who is "placed crosswise in the
universe."

The theology of the cross does not give a neat logical solution to the
problem of evil. It does mean that when creatures suffer, are abandoned, and
die, God goes through it with them. Luther said, "The cross alone is our
theology."18We may add, "The cross alone
is our theodicy."

And the resurrection of the crucified shows that while "survival of the
fittest" may be an accurate description of the biological process through
which life has evolved, it is not God's last word. There is hope for those who
have not survived - and in the end, that includes all of us.

The hope that is given in the resurrection of the Crucified extends beyond
our human species. We are not the only object of God's love and concern. Paul
speaks in Romans of "the whole creation" finally being liberated from
bondage to decay and being given "the freedom of the glory of the children
of God" (Rom.8:21-22 NRSV. Cf. also Sir.18:13). As the vision of Isaiah 11
suggests, all living things have a place in God's ultimate future.

How could this be? One of the basic christological principles is "what
has not been assumed has not been healed."19To save the whole human, God became fully human. But we are organically
related to all other species on earth, and each of us bears in our body the
evolutionary history of humanity. The fully human Jesus also embodies that
history. He too is related to all life on earth, and thus recapitulates
creation. And fully divine, he brings all things back to God. "Through him
God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in
heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross" (Col.1:20 NRSV).

References

1. Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes,
updated edition (Basic, New York, 1988).